What We Get Wrong About Aging with Dr. Jacob Kendall | POP 1381

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What if aging is about far more than just your physical health? Are we treating aging as a personal issue when it’s really a societal one? Why is social work a critical pillar in “four dimensional” health care?

In this podcast episode, Joe Sanok discusses what we get wrong about aging with Dr. Jacob Kendall. 

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Meet Dr. Jacob Kendall

Dr. Jacob Kendall is a gerontologist, social worker, public health scholar, and speaker specializing in aging, health equity, caregiving, and the intersection of health systems and society. He holds master’s degrees in social work and public health, along with a Ph.D. in Aging Studies from Tulane University.

A former professor of global health and social work, Jacob’s work focuses on helping individuals, organizations, and policymakers better understand the complex social, cultural, economic, and medical dimensions of aging. Drawing from both professional expertise and personal experience as a heart patient and caregiver, he developed the 4D™ Health framework, an interdisciplinary approach to understanding health across the lifespan.

Visit Dr Kendall’s website and connect on LinkedIn.

What we get wrong about aging 

Dr. Kendall explains that when we approach aging, with all its medical, social, and cultural implications, as something separate from our everyday living, we only cause ourselves more problems – and make aging more difficult, dangerous, or unnecessarily painful. 

All these different things are connected, but we treat aging as this medical issue, and we just expect to sail off into the sunset and decline as we go on, but that’s just not a sufficient or even acurate way of looking at it. (Dr. Jacob Kendall) 

To illustrate the complexity and interconnectedness of aging, Jacob explains aging as if it were a four dimensional phenomenon that we are trying to understand with a one dimensional approach. 

We need to approach aging from a very broadly disciplinary, multidimensional perspective. If we’re only listening to our physicians, if we’re only taking medicines for things to get better, if we’re only focusing on patients and we’re not including families and caregivers, and the economic, cultural, political implications of aging … And how it’s tied to other issues like immigration, even AI, then we’re not addressing [aging] fully. (Dr. Jacob Kendall)

Why siloed thinking around aging works against us

Engaging with aging as a singular, siloed issue is a common issue in academia which bleeds into how it is approached in wider society, across other disciplines. 

It’s good that we have experts. I’m very glad that the surgeons who did my surgery are experts … but it’s really easy to get caught up on your own particular way of thinking. (Dr. Jacob Kendall)

If people continuously fail to consider how illnesses, diseases, and health conditions affect the wider community in aging, not just the individual or their family, then aging won’t be well-addressed.  

I think Alzeimers is largely seen as a medical issue that focuses on the person who has it, but we have to include families and caregivers within that. We’re getting better, but it’s not to the point where we need it yet … [because] Alzeimers is anything but one-dimensional. (Dr Jacob Kendall)

The four dimensional way of thinking about aging

1 – Zooming in and out of issues to see their inner depths and how they relate to the wider causes and issues in society 

2 – Different multidisciplinary perspectives on a given aging or medical issue, including yet more than the bio-medical perspective

3 – Context of living and aging that is tied to your zip code 

4 – Time component, and our issues with planning in advance 

We’re really terrible at planning in advance. The reason that crises are crises is because we didn’t plan for them ahead of time. Everyone, every single person … needs to anticipate and expect to be a caregiver at some point and then later than that, need a caregiver at some point. It’s going to happen, there’s absolutely no one who’s untouched by any of that. (Dr. Jacob Kendall)

Policy changes that could move us in the right direction

Here’s the one example that Jacob can give: social workers and similar kinds of professionals need to be more centralized on interdisciplinary medical teams and projects, because they do the essential work that no one else wants to do. 

It is difficult to bring everything together, from the pharmacist, nurse, from the physician, from the dietitian, and discharge people, and make sure that they’re going to be connected to the resources that they need once they leave the hospital. That’s really important, and the amount that social workers are paid … they’re not paid [enough that] reflects the difficulty of that work. (Dr. Jacob Kendall)

Dr. Kendall goes on to say that we need to drastically restructure how we value certain kinds of services, exactly like social workers. 

Secondly, Jacob wants the medical industry to turn away from treating human bodies like commodities, which he knows is near impossible, because changing that would mean making billionaires “stop loving money.”

If I could wave a magic wand … Ideally, we make it to where the patient and the family are at the center, and all the pieces are around them. That’s not how it is now. I do think that medical providers are getting better, that they hate insurance companies as much as we patients do, but there’s still a long way to go. (Dr. Jacob Kendall)

Dr. Jacob Kendall’s advice to private practitioners

You come first. You have to take care of yourself before you help others, and if you are burning yourself out, you won’t be able to do the good that you know you can. So, put your oxygen mask on first, and keep going. 

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Meet Joe Sanok

Joe Sanok helps counselors to create thriving practices that are the envy of other counselors. He has helped counselors to grow their businesses by 50-500% and is proud of all the private practice owners who are growing their income, influence, and impact on the world. Click here to explore consulting with Joe.

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